Kiss A Handsome Stranger

These pots, on the other hand, could hold plants. She smiled. Poison ivy, maybe.

A flame of excitement sprang up. Daisy’s ceramic work, although technically accomplished, had until now lacked uniqueness, but this idea was promising. Although other artists had made pots with faces, she knew she could take her idea in new directions.

How ironic that this development had been inspired by Chance Foster!

She spent the rest of the afternoon experimenting with ways to create character faces on her pots. By making slight depressions, she created eye sockets and other contours that gave her work an even more distinctive look.

By late afternoon Daisy’s arms ached pleasantly and her agitation over the near encounter with Chance had dissipated. She was cleaning the studio when the phone rang.

“Native Art,” she responded.

“Hi, Native, this is Elise!” joked her friend.

How could such a delightful woman have such a heartless brother? Daisy wondered, not for the first time. “What’s up?”

“I picked my colors! Deep-rose and pale-yellow!”

Daisy didn’t immediately grasp her friend’s meaning. Then it hit. “Oh, for the wedding.” Elise and her fiancé, James, would be walking down the aisle in September, three months from now. “That sounds lovely.”

“You know what this means,” Elise said. “We can start looking at bridesmaids’ dresses for you and Phoebe.”

“Great.” Since Elise hadn’t wanted to favor one of them as the maid of honor, they were both going to walk down the aisle together. It would be kind of funky, Daisy thought, but fun.

“How about if we meet for a swim right after work? Say, five-thirty?” Elise went on. “We can talk strategy and cool off at the same time.”

Although it was only June, temperatures hovered in the high eighties. “Sounds great.”

“See you there.”

“There” meant the Mesa Blue condominium complex, where the three women lived. The blue-tiled pool, nestled among ferns and a few squatty palms, provided a refreshing meeting place in summer months.

Daisy couldn’t wait to take a dip and see her friends. After draping loose plastic covers over the pots to prevent cracking, she hurried home.

CHANCE FOSTER COULD HAVE sworn he recognized the smudged redhead outside the art gallery. By the time he strolled by, though, she’d disappeared and the place was closed.

He stood on the sidewalk like a smitten teenager, debating whether he dared knock. But what would he say? That two months ago he’d spent a wonderful evening with a mysterious woman and now he was trying to find her?

He couldn’t understand how such an intriguing woman could get invited to his sister’s engagement party without either Elise or Phoebe knowing her. Afterward, both had roundly denied knowing anyone named Deirdre.

Deciding not to waste any more time on a wild-goose chase, he walked back to his office. Still, Chance’s mind wouldn’t leave the subject.

He told himself for the umpteenth time that he must have been mistaken in his impression of Deirdre. The honest, direct, sunny lady who’d knocked him off balance wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye. There must be a darker side to her personality. Or maybe she’d fooled him from the beginning.

Perhaps she was married and cheating on her husband. Or so afraid of commitment that she panicked when she met a guy she might care about.

As a family law attorney, Chance had seen how many things could go wrong in a relationship. A lot of times the problems sprang from a partner who lacked the character to stick around and stay faithful when the going got tough.

He would like to see Deirdre again, though, at least to learn why she’d bailed out on him. And so he could stop imagining he saw her on the street, the way he’d done today and several times previously.

As he reached the professional building, Chance wondered if his sister and her fiancé had followed his advice to get premarital counseling. People as successful as those two—Elise was a French professor, James a wealthy businessman—didn’t think they needed any preparation for marriage. But to Chance, that was like someone saying he didn’t need medical insurance because he was healthy.

He decided to drop by her condo after work and, as her big brother, take the liberty of nagging a bit.

“I AM NOT GOING TO WEAR a yellow dress!” declared Phoebe. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she swished her feet in the water. “Yellow looks awful on blondes. And rose will do terrible things to Daisy’s complexion! I mean, she’s a redhead, for heaven’s sake.”

“I was thinking of the flowers,” Elise admitted. “Yellow and red roses would look so pretty in a bouquet.”

Daisy tilted her face to soak up the lingering rays of sunshine. With her tendency to freckle, she couldn’t enjoy midday sunbathing, so this was a treat.

“Come on, Daisy!” Phoebe prodded her with an elbow. “Back me up, here. Yellow wouldn’t look so great on you, either.”

Daisy stretched and smothered a yawn. Not that she wasn’t vitally interested in her friends’ arrangements, but after all, Phoebe was the beauty consultant. She was also studying biochemistry with the goal of establishing her own cosmetics company, and she had a good sense of what colors looked right on people.

Daisy’s own taste ran to the offbeat. Her swimsuit, for example, had been created by her mother, Jeanine Redford, a seamstress and costume designer in Tempe.

A single, angled black strap continued as a diagonal black slash across the emerald green stretch fabric of the swimsuit. A geometric cutout at the waist furthered the impact. It wasn’t so much a bathing suit as a dramatic statement.

“We could ask my mom,” she said. “She’d come up with a memorable design.”

Elise grinned. “I love your mother’s costumes, but not for my wedding, thank you.” To Phoebe she said, “The yellow can go, but I like deep-rose.”

Phoebe stood up, a move that displayed her impressive figure to advantage. In fact, the former actress was impressive to look at from any angle.

“I came here to swim, not argue,” she said. “First one to reach the far end gets to pick the colors, okay?”

She dived in, water closing over her head with scarcely a ripple. The pool looked so inviting that Daisy jumped in and swam after her friend.

“It’s my wedding so I get to choose!” shouted Elise, and made a long arcing dive past Daisy. A few furious kicks carried her past Phoebe, as well, and she arrived at the far end first. “Deep-rose,” she reaffirmed when she could speak. “Deep rose and…something.”

Phoebe emerged and caught her breath. “Forget rose. How about green?” she said. “Green and gold.”

Elise grimaced. “That sounds like pom-poms at a high school football game.”

“Purple and white?” Daisy suggested as she paddled alongside.

“That’s for a royal coronation,” said Elise. “I don’t care how rich James is, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m turning into a princess.”

A burst of meowing drew their attention toward apartment 1B. On the patio, a bevy of cats gathered as a fiftyish woman with unnaturally red hair filled their feeding dishes.

“I wonder how Frannie and Bill are getting along?” Phoebe mused.

Red-haired Frannie, with her brightly colored clothes and beehive hairdo, made an odd contrast to the soft-spoken building superintendent who lived in a nearby unit. The two had been edging toward each other for months and finally seemed to be hitting it off, but had parted after a jealous quarrel.

Apparently Bill had also noticed the cat noises. The large, usually jovial man, returning from one of his periodic inspections of the premises, stopped near the pool and gazed wistfully toward Frannie.

She ignored him, and after a moment Jeff Hawkin, the handyman, stuck his head out of the laundry room and requested Bill’s attention. Daisy hoped they were fixing the number three dryer, which ate quarters.

“Pale-pink might work,” Phoebe suggested, returning to their previous conversation.